De Menezes to head up NetApp

Gary de Menezes has been appointed to head up the NetApp team in South Africa and the SADC region.
Considered a veteran of the local IT industry with more than 28 years’ experience, De Menezes will be responsible for all NetApp business across the southern African region and his responsibilities include the development and execution of sales and channel strategies, expanding the NetApp customer base within the region, and enhancing the partner and alliances ecosystem.
He will report to the senior director for the Middle East, Eastern Europe & Turkey, Africa, Russia & CIS region (MEEEAR), Konstantin Ebert.
“The appointment of De Menezes demonstrates NetApp’s commitment to its African growth strategy and affirms that NetApp will continue to develop and prosper in these markets, extracting maximum impact from the expected high domestic growth,” says Ebert. “We have now completed our leadership appointments in Africa and the Middle East and believe strongly in their ability to lead NetApp in their respective regions.”
To answer local customers’ challenges, the company says it will look to the strength of its channel and technology alliances as well as the innovation leadership as demonstrated by the depth of its portfolio and best-in-class quality solutions. These include NetApp Data ONTAP, the Number 1 branded storage operating system worldwide, the high-performance E-Series and the most comprehensive enterprise flash storage offering in the business.
“Enterprise storage has been evolving in recent years as more data, and more kinds of data, enter the digital universe, and enterprises seek the most effective ways to manage and monetise it,” says De Menezes. “While smaller businesses are increasingly moving to SaaS applications and cloud-based storage to achieve lower costs and greater agility, most enterprises need to pursue a hybrid strategy, retaining a significant amount of storage capacity on-premise for reasons of performance, security, regulatory and compliance. The major in-house infrastructure trend among enterprises is moving away from traditional siloed NAS and SAN solutions towards the kind of software-defined scale-out storage.”
He says that NetApp will help companies design and implement these strategies, enabled by NetApp’s channel model and working with business partners.
“We plan to continue to grow, further invest and develop local skills in South Africa, and help companies by implementing the best-of-breed solutions which rely on business partnerships in the country,” De Menezes adds.
Prior to joining NetApp, De Menezes was the regional director at Oracle and responsible for the systems business following the acquisition of Sun Microsystems by Oracle in 2010. He has also held senior positions at Compaq, Hewlett Packard, Lenovo and Acer.